(no subject)

Thought of the day:

When I was a child, I was an authoritarian conservative Christian who believed, just like everyone around me, that the big bad liberals were maliciously lurking outside the door, waiting to Take Our Freedoms Away; charitably, maybe it was just because they weren't clever enough to realize we were really right. After all, if they were smart and good people, they would have agreed with us.

Now that I'm an adult, I'm a socialist liberal of uncomfortable agnosticism, with a peer group consisting largely of people who believe that the big bad religious conservatives are maliciously lurking outside the door, waiting to Take Our Freedoms Away; charitably, maybe it's because they're just too stupid to realize we're really right. After all, if they were smart and good people, they would agree with us.

When I think about this, I worry a bit. Especially because I know a lot of conservative Christians and liberal atheists, and on both sides they seem like intelligent, good people who honestly want to do what's best for everyone.

(Well. Most of them do.)

ETA:

( And now, less of this 'concise' thing. )

(no subject)

In Plautus class, we're really breezing through the material now that we have the swing of things; it's still hard to translate, but we're going through it amazingly fast in class. (I did an entire twenty-line Pardalisca speech by myself today, which was intimidating but fun; it's the one where she explains all the wacky things going on inside the house while the wedding feast is being prepared.) We actually hit the end of our assigned reading before the end of class, so the prof decided to talk some more about Roman slavery.

Now, that itself was interesting. But one area that he emphasized that I found fascinating--because apparently I had missed this before--is that the sort of slavery practiced by Rome, Athens, and the southern states of the US, is actually very rare in history. He said those were basically three of the five...nations? states? empires? large/significant political bodies, in any case, that had performed slavery in such a manner. And it doesn't seem so odd to Americans because, well, there we are in that list of five.

Basically: a whole lot of societies, especially early societies, had some form of "constrained labor," which might or might not be identified as slavery by us today. Apprenticeships, serfdom, indentured work... I forget what he called the type of work where the state calls up groups of people periodically to perform large municipal projects. (Egyptian pyramids? Largely built by either professionals or citizens doing temporary labor, not slaves.) But the form of slavery the Romans and Americans had, in which a large percentage of the population is treated legally as owned objects that can be sold at will, does a significant portion of economically-important work, and has more children born into the same position? Not that common.

American slavery had some significant differences from the Roman and Greek types, too; as the prof put it, when you run off and enslave the people in the city fifty miles away, they look and talk and act pretty much like you do, so you don't get the permanent social distinction between The Type Of People Who Are Slaves and The Type Of People Who Are Free, but instead get a distinction between those who are currently slaves or free. (And you get all sorts of uneasy, brutal reactions from the Romans to be very pointed about slavery being a marked state, because they were full well aware how similar the groups were.) A freed slave in Rome becomes a Roman citizen, current slaves run a lot of the city government... It's not the same as American slavery was in a lot of respects.

But in both cases, if every slave disappeared overnight, the economy would collapse. I believe the high-water mark for Roman slavery had about 30% of the population in Italy being a slave of some type, and a large percentage of them would be in agriculture. But they were everywhere; there wasn't really a form of life in Italy--especially urban Italy--where you'd go very long on a given week, or day, without seeing someone who was a slave. That kind of pervasive slavery has a massive impact on the culture.

Anyway. Just thought that was very interesting, especially since my planned paper topic thing for Latin class is going to be on the relationship between slaves in Casina. And because it had stuff in there that I definitely hadn't known.